Belzhar

by Meg Wolitzer

  I thought that over Christmas break, you could make sure to spend extra time with Leo. He’s still struggling with how to be a social person in the world, which he never really had to deal with before. But now that he is more in the world, and less in his fantasy world with all those wizards and driftlords (is that the right word?), he needs guidance.

  Darling, you’re someone who’s been through tough times. Like a driftlord you’ve “drifted,” but like a wizard you now seem “wise.” So maybe when you’re home you could give your little brother a hand. Dad and I would be grateful.

  xoxo

  Mom

  I put the letter back in its envelope, feeling terrible as I remember how, earlier in the semester, she’d asked me to write to Leo, and I never had. Later in the afternoon, I take my calling card down to the pay phone and call home. It’s not the end of the workday yet, so I know my mom and dad will both still be in the office at Gallahue and Gallahue LLP. But Leo should be home by now.

  After half a dozen rings he says hello in his slightly nasal voice.

  “It’s your sister,” I say. “Remember me?”

  “Maybe,” Leo says. “Long brown hair?”

  “Yep. How was Thanksgiving?”

  “It was all right. Aunt Paula and Uncle Donald came from Teaneck. They brought kale.”

  “Sorry I missed that.”

  “The relatives or the kale?”

  “Both,” I say.

  There’s a pause and I can hear crunching. Leo’s eating an after-school snack, probably cool-ranch-flavored chips. In the background I hear the TV, or maybe the computer, and then a boy’s voice saying, “Where’d you go, Gallahue?”

  “I’ll be right in!” Leo calls.

  “Who’s that?” I ask innocently.

  “A friend.”

  “You don’t have friends,” I say. “Not the kind who come over after school.” I know this sounds mean, but it’s true. “Maybe you have forty-year-old online friends who live with their parents,” I go on. “And who play Magic Driftlord.”

  “Dream Wanderers,” he corrects me. “Driftlords are characters in Dream Wanderers. And I do have a real friend. Connor Bunch.”

  “So I’ve heard. Do Mom and Dad know he’s over?”

  “Why, are you going to tell them?” Leo asks in a nasty voice.

  “Whoa, little bro, who are you these days?” I say. “By the way, I know about the shoplifting.”

  There’s a silence. “It wasn’t supposed to go down that way,” Leo bursts out. “Connor said there weren’t any security cameras in that part of the—”

  “Leo,” I interrupt. “You don’t just go from being an unconscious little dweeb to being a criminal. Look,” I say in a softer voice, “I know it’s good to have a friend and everything. But use your head! You can’t go along with whatever Connor Bunch says just because you’re glad he wants to hang out with you.”

  “I don’t go along with whatever he says. You should hear some of the things I say no to!” Leo lowers his voice and says, “But he’s the only one who’s nice to me, Jam.”

  “What were you going to do with the spray paint? Vandalize the school?”

  “Connor had an idea. He just hadn’t told me yet. We didn’t get that far because we got caught.”

  “Well, I’m sure it was something incredibly idiotic,” I tell him. “And I’m glad you got caught, Leo. Otherwise, you might’ve done it a second time.”

  There’s a long, long pause, and Leo confesses, “Actually, this was the second time. The first time, we didn’t get caught. But we hardly took anything then. Just a couple of Snickers bars. Connor says that stores don’t even care about the little stuff, that they factor it in—”

  “Are you nuts, Leo? It’s stealing. You’re cheating hardworking people out of the money they earned. Just think about Mom and Dad.”

  “What about them?” he says glumly.

  “What if a guy came to Gallahue and Gallahue LLP, wanting them to be his accountants? And after Mom and Dad did a little work for him—a little hard work that they went to school to learn how to do—he ran out of the building without paying. And our parents had done this work so they could afford our food and clothes and our orthodontia. And so maybe we could all take a vacation once in a while. But the guy decided, ‘Screw the Gallahues, I won’t pay.’ Would that be right?”

  “No,” Leo says with a tiny, choking sob.

  “Exactly,” I say.

  I realize that I sound a little like my mom or dad now, but not in a bad way. I listen for a second or two while Leo struggles to contain his emotions. I don’t want to make him feel too bad, so I say, “Listen, I’m coming home for Christmas. I’m not going to get snowed in this time. And you and I are going to hang out, okay? We can sit in my room—I’ll let you come in more, I won’t say ‘Go away’ through the door—and we can have life conversations and stuff.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep.”

  “Will you play me some indie rock?”

  “Indie rock? Is that what you want me to do?” I’m completely surprised by this. I had no idea that Leo even knew music existed.

  “Yes,” he says, snuffling. “I think it’s time.”

  “Okay, then,” I say. “I will.”

  • • •

  When our class meets again in the darkened classroom around the candle, our main topic of conversation is the end of the journals. We’ve each got an average of three more visits left before the last line gets covered with writing.

  “And then what?” says Marc. He’s so agitated about this that he can’t sit still, but keeps drumming his fingers on the floor like a hyperactive kid.

  “And then we find a way to keep going back,” says Sierra. “We have to. I’m not going to leave André there.”

  “No one says you have to,” says Casey.

  “But no one’s told us how to keep going.”

  “No one’s told us anything,” Griffin says.

  As the end of the journals seems to be closing in, none of us knows what to do, and we’re all getting increasingly anxious.

  “Maybe, on the last day of class, Mrs. Q will give us a second journal,” says Casey. “And we can take it with us when we go home for Christmas.”

  “A blue leather journal,” says Marc.

  “Nah, that’s not going to happen,” says Sierra. “And you know it.”

  I feel a pressure building up in my chest, and my throat gets thick. “Oh, Jam,” my mom used to say in the first weeks and months after I lost Reeve, “where did you go?” I was empty then, I was barely a person. But because of Belzhar, I’ve been coming around, returning to my “old self,” as my parents would probably say if they could see me now. To lose Reeve a second time would empty me out all over again.

  “I don’t think I could live without seeing André,” Sierra says. She isn’t being melodramatic. She’s stating a fact.

  Everyone’s quiet and worried, and finally someone says it’s getting late. Griffin leans over to blow out the candle—he’s always the one who makes sure it’s out, and since the trip to the farm I know why—when we hear tires on snow, and see a spinning red light pour through the windows.

  “Oh, come on, this can’t be happening,” says Casey, and Marc helps her into her chair as car doors slam, and then campus security barges first into the building, and then the classroom. We’re busted.

  A little while later the headmaster, Dr. Gant, meets us for an “emergency meeting” in his office. He’s been called away from the boys’ dorm, where he also serves as houseparent, and where he was probably just starting to get everyone settled down for the night. We all take seats around his woody, dimly-lit room, a place I’ve only seen once, the first day I arrived here. I was in such a state that afternoon, monosyllabic and furious.

  How long ago that day se
ems. I remember how my mom stood in my dorm room punching the edges of my orange study buddy to distribute the filling evenly. And how DJ stared at me from her bed, and I was positive that she and I would always dislike each other.

  All I could think about, that day, was how much I missed Reeve.

  Everything’s different now.

  “People,” says Dr. Gant. He’s a mild, middle-aged man who looks as if he’d be very sorry to have to discipline anybody. “What were you thinking? You can’t go off unsupervised like that. And you know that candles are a forbidden item here, in a school full of old wooden buildings.”

  “I was on it,” says Griffin defensively, his chin up. “I would never have let anything happen.” Me, of all people, he means.

  “But there are rules, Griffin,” says Dr. Gant. “Have you met there at night before?” No one wants to answer. “Security says they found older wax drippings on the floor, so I’m guessing the answer is yes.”

  “All right,” Casey says. “Yes, we have.”

  “But why?” he asks. “Is it really just to ‘hang out,’ like you told security? Is that it?”

  “Sort of,” says Marc. I can see how hard it is for him to lie to an authority figure, or even be vague.

  “It sounds a little more complicated than that,” says Dr. Gant. He pauses. “We’ve had a couple of issues with the Special Topics in English people in previous years. They tend to be a very close group. One year they all wandered off into the woods for an hour, and no one knew where they were. Another year they seemed to . . . invent their own language. But I don’t want to talk about students from the past. I want to talk about what’s going on with all of you right now.”

  Of course, it’s interesting to get this information about previous classes, but none of us can ask any more questions about it. And what are we supposed to say about ourselves: All right, Dr. Gant, here’s the deal: Twice a week we write in our journals, which take us to a place where our wrecked lives have been restored. Except now we’re just about out of room in the journals, so we need to figure out how to extend our time in that place we go to, because we can’t bear to stop going there.

  So, please, Dr. Gant, can you just pretend we weren’t busted, and let us keep meeting once a week in the classroom late at night?

  But we reveal nothing to him, and finally he removes his rimless eyeglasses and rubs his eyes, then puts the glasses back on, looping the wires carefully over his ears.

  “I’m very sorry,” he says, looking at each of us one by one. “But for the rest of the semester, with the exception of classes and meals and rehearsals, consider yourselves members of another class. Let’s call it Special Topics in Being Grounded.”

  CHAPTER

  17

  EVERYTHING’S CRACKING APART NOW, AND WE know it. Kept separate from one another all week, we can’t talk openly about what to do about the rapidly arriving end of the journals. We only get together in class and at meals, but we never have extended privacy. And finally we’re each down to having five pages left. One single trip remains, and then no one knows what will happen. Or maybe we do know, and it isn’t good.

  At breakfast, speaking as cryptically as possible, we all agree to postpone our next visits. None of us will go back to Belzhar until we have some kind of plan in place.

  “Belzhar?” asks DJ from two seats down the table, her mouth full of egg. “What’s that?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “It’s just, you know, a thing in a book.” This seems to satisfy her. Or at least bore her enough so that she immediately loses interest.

  Maybe, I think, once the last line of a journal is filled in, that person’s Belzhar ceases to exist. Maybe it shuts down for good, like a business whose owners have left town overnight. Or maybe it explodes like something deep in space, unseen and unheard by anyone, gone for good.

  What would it be like to leave Belzhar behind? I have to ask myself this, because we’re all wondering. When I think about letting go of that world, I picture myself off in the real world—maybe back in New Jersey, living my life again, a new version of it.

  What would that life look like? I guess I’d just be myself. Someone in high school with some kind of future. Maybe I’d join the a cappella group there. I could even try and convince Hannah to join too; she has a good voice. I might have things to look forward to again, things I can’t even imagine yet.

  On Friday night I’m in my dorm room watching DJ get ready to go out to the social. “Being grounded is so unfair,” I say, sitting on my bed in Griffin’s hoodie. “I feel like a prisoner.”

  “I don’t get it,” she says. “You hate socials as much as I do. What do you care if you can’t go?”

  Of course, DJ has no idea about Belzhar, so she wouldn’t understand why I need to be with everyone in my class now. And, also, why I need to be with Griffin. “I do hate socials,” is all I say, “but it would be better than being grounded.”

  “I’ll come back and tell you all the highlights,” DJ promises, and then she’s gone.

  So I sit and try to do my homework while the whole school except the Special Topics people stands around under the disco ball in the gym. I resist going to Belzhar now, though it would be the easiest thing in the world to simply write in my journal and be with Reeve one more time, in that place where everything’s familiar and predictable and easy and good. I’d worry later about how to get back there even after the journal is filled.

  But, like we agreed, I keep myself from making that visit. Instead I throw myself into math, which is pretty hilarious, given my subnormal math skills. And what’s even more hilarious is that I actually understand all the concepts for once, and I have a feeling I’m going to ace the homework, and the upcoming test. I’ve actually been doing well in most of my classes since I started going to Belzhar. This, like so many other things that have happened, is totally unexpected.

  • • •

  In the morning I sit at breakfast with Sierra; Griffin hasn’t shown up yet, and I keep looking toward the door to see if he’s coming in. Then Casey enters and comes right over to our table. She parks her chair in front of us as if she has an announcement to make. “What is it?” I ask nervously. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter,” Casey says. “But I have to tell you both something.” She looks around to see who else might be listening. It seems safe, and she pauses for several seconds, then quietly says, “I went to Belzhar last night.”

  “You did?” I say. “I thought we weren’t going to do that yet.”

  “I know. But Marc and I were kind of talking in code at dinner last night. And we both basically decided, enough already. We hated the stress of not knowing what was going to happen when the journals finally ended. And we decided to find out. To take the plunge, despite what we all agreed. So we both went back. Yes, even Marc, who never breaks rules.”

  “And?” Sierra says, staring at Casey, and I realize that I’m staring at her too.

  “What exactly do you want to know?” Casey asks.

  “Well, everything,” says Sierra.

  “Like, when it was over and you looked at your journal,” I say, “was it definitely filled in all the way to the end?” Casey nods. “So did you figure out a way to get back there next time?” I ask. I know we really shouldn’t be talking like this out in the open, but there’s no other choice.

  Casey shakes her head no. She looks at us as if she feels sorry for us; we’re ignorant about all of this, and she’s knowledgeable. “There’s no way back,” she says gently.

  We’re both silent. “Are you sure?” Sierra asks.

  “Yes. I’m sorry,” she adds, as if we might think it’s her fault.

  So: Once you’re done, you’re done? This means that Casey will never have a place to go where she can walk, and run.

  And after I make my final visit, I can never see Reeve again. I won�
��t touch him, or talk to him. I’ll never hear his voice again. I want to shut out what Casey’s just told me, and make it not be true.

  “So we actually lose Belzhar, and everything that comes with it?” Sierra asks in a dull, low voice.

  “Right,” Casey says.

  If Sierra were to go back, at the end of the visit she would lose her brother all over again, but this time it would be forever.

  “But what’s it actually like going there for the last time?” Sierra asks. “Is it different from all the other times?”

  “Oh yeah,” says Casey.

  “How?” I press.

  Casey takes a moment. “It’s traumatic,” she says.

  This is not what either of us wants to hear.

  “I can’t really put it any other way,” Casey continues. “I don’t want to scare you, but I have to tell you what I know. The thing that happened to you in real life, on your worst day? You have to live it again. At least, I had to.”

  “Oh,” I say, my voice coming out so small. I don’t think I could live through that last day with Reeve again.

  “For me, it started out like every other trip to Belzhar,” Casey tells us. “But soon it was different. I was in the car, and my mom was driving, but this time it was clear that she was drunk and that no way should she be behind the wheel. I could finally, totally see through all the charming leprechaun bullshit. Her judgment was off. The car was weaving. It skidded off the road and slammed into that stone wall. And it was like a building fell on me.”

  Casey is suddenly crying, and Sierra and I both lean forward and try to comfort her. Other kids look at us from their tables again, and one girl, a friend of Casey’s from the dorm, gets up and starts to come over, but Sierra waves her off.

  “I felt everything,” Casey says in a quiet, fierce voice. “I didn’t black out as soon as I thought I had. My mom was leaning over me when the ambulance came, and she was saying, ‘Oh God, it’s all my fault. I’m drunk, Casey, and I did this to you. I did this to my little girl.’ I never remembered that before. And you know what, it was her fault, and I can’t totally forgive her, at least not now. It’s so hard, but at least now I remember what’s what. At least now it’s real.”